How to set a custom domain on blogger – 10 simple steps

Its a smart idea to start something with low investment and scale it up later and if the start is free, Boom ! On the same note it happens that the blogger blog (with blogspot.com subdomain) you have created sometime back for free as hobby started to receive good response and you wish you had started off with a custom domain (something like “www.yourname.com” instead of “www.yourname.blogspot.com”).

Well if you’re caught in the same situation, don’t worry, you can always setup a custom domain for your blogger blog. You just need to buy a domain name of your choice and the blog can be re-directed to the domain in few simple steps.

So if you are reading this article I assume you are planning to setup a custom domain for your blogger blog. There are several advantages of using custom domain which doesn’t cost much for a whole year. First time buyer can claim a domain name for as low as 99 cents by using promo codes. You can browse through this blog to find promo/coupon codes in case you are looking to buy a domain name for this ridiculously low price. Let’s take a look at few advantages of having a custom domain name for your blog:

Branding –

The custom domain can help with branding a blog or a website. Branding will not only make people remember your blog name but also help with establishing a good reputation of yours (the author) and your blog on the internet.

Branding will open the door for various other opportunities as well such as companies approaching you for advertising their products on your blog, people coming back to you seeking advise/consultancy etc.

Easy to remember –

Having a custom domain such as “www.yourname.com” is comparatively easier to remember than “www.yourname.blogspot.com”.

People like to quote website names while participating in a discussion and nothing else can make them remember your website than a easy website URL. Go ahead and buy a custom domain name for your blogspot blog today !

SEO –

If you are into blogging for sometime, you must have basic idea about SEO and how important it is for a website. People try hard to make their website SEO friendly and having a custom domain is one of the ways to do so. Search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Duckduckgo give preference to top level domains (except for few exceptions) while ranking websites in search results.

The search engines consider only limited characters to be displayed in search results hence its good to use custom domain than blogspot.com sub-domain that makes the URL little longer and hard to fit in the limit.

Monetization opportunities

Wouldn’t it be a good idea to make some money out of your blog? The companies or the individuals who want to promote their blog/website contact the webmasters running blog with a custom domain name not the sub-domain for banner/text advertisement.

Buying a custom domain name for your blogger blog will help you monetising your blog by attracting the interested advertisers however the advertising cost depends on the traffic at your blog.

Trust/reliability factor-

The information shared via top level domains is considered more reliable and trustworthy than the sub-domains.

You will notice apart from Google (who owns blogspot.com blogging platform), no other good company uses sub-domain for its blog. Having a custom domain for your blog creates a sense of accurate information in the mind of readers.

How to setup a custom domain on blogger

In this article I will be covering tutorial to setup a custom domain registered at Godaddy.com. Godaddy is a leading domain registrar offering service for several years. If you could understand the logic, this tutorial will help you configure with other registrars as well, I’ll make it super easy to understand.

However, if you still face difficulty in setting up domain with either Godaddy or any other registrar, you can contact me through email or contact us page.

Step:1- Log in to blogspot.com using Gmail username and password and go to Settings.

Step:2 – Go to Settings >Basic. Click “+ Setup a 3rd party URL for your blog” and enter the domain you have registered at Godddy and click Save button at the bottom.

Step:3 – On clicking save button, It will give the error “We have not been able to verify your authority to this domain Error 12” . The error occurred because blogger needs to verify the ownership of the domain. Copy two lines highlighted in red in below image (www – ghs.google.com & other one)

Step:4 – Go to www.godaddy.com and login to your account using username and password that you have entered at the time of registering domain name.

Step:5 – Click on “Manage DNS” as shown in below image.

Step:6 – The next step is to click DNS Zone File tab where you can add new records from.

Step:7 – Click on “Add Record” and select CNAME (Alias) as Record types. Enter the text you have copied from blogger one by one and click save as shown in below image (as per step 3).

Step:8 – Click “Add Records” and select A (Host) as Record types. Add following IP’s under “Points to” text box one by one. Enter “@” in “Hosts” text box each time.

216.239.32.21

216.239.34.21

216.239.36.21

216.239.38.21

Click Finish at the end.

Step:9 – Make sure all the records as specified are entered. Click “Save Changes” to save all the changes.

Step:10 – Go back to blogger and click “Save” button. The error you were getting earlier should vanish now. Click edit again and tick the check box below the text box and hit Save button as shown in below image.

Congratulations ! you have successfully configured the custom domain for your blogger blog. Now the domain will be re-directed to your blogger blog and it will take sometime for search engines to crawl the custom domain URL and display in search results.

Sunil is the founder of Blogging an Art, Blogger & Internet Marketing Consultant. He likes to write about SEO, Affiliate marketing, Social media marketing, Email marketing and other related stuff. He is an active contributor at various tech blogs as well and loves to travel.

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About me

Besides being the founder of BloggingAnArt.com, I'm a Blogger & Internet Marketing Consultant. I've been active in Internet Marketing for about a decade and helped many businesses to grow their website traffic and sales multiple fold. Read more